“Where’s my violin?”
“Have some pity.”
“Have some sense.”
“I’ll go alone, then.”
There was a pause. He had spoken the one word she could not abide: alone. All through his growing up, our father said, he couldn’t walk to the corner for a newspaper without his mother urging him to take someone along.
“Take Patrick, then,” she said. “He’s got his name.”
“I will,” he said.
It was the laughter in her voice when next she spoke that signaled to their children that the fight was over. That it had brewed some pleasure for them both. “If the bastard’s going to haunt anyone,” she said, “it will be Patrick.”
Mr. Tierney said, “A ghost could do worse.”
And so our father found himself on the train to Poughkeepsie for the funeral of his grandfather, and namesake, a man he’d never met.
Although Michael Tierney was wearing what he called his “civilian clothes”—starched collar, vest, fine dark wool suit with a thin, pale violet stripe, gleaming shoes, brushed bowler—he retained nevertheless his erect and elegant doorman’s bearing throughout the ride. There was a gold watch and a fob, subtly displayed across his trim middle. A smooth cheek newly shaven and redolent of bay rum. A fine chestnut mustache, gleaming like polished wood, trimmed and combed.
The suit Patrick wore was also fine. It had been purchased from a Jewish tailor on the Lower East Side—one of his father’s “cronies”—for his older brother’s high school graduation just the year before, but because Tom had found work at the Navy Yard, and not in an office, it had been stored ever since in a linen suit bag, weighted with mothballs and cedar blocks.
Given the short notice—the telegram had come from his grandfather’s maiden sister, Rose, just two days ago—his mother had only a single sunny afternoon to air it at the window, and so it retained a whiff of what his father called “its hibernation.” Comically, Mr. Tierney sprinkled his son with cologne before they left the apartment, making the sign of the cross and murmuring in Latin. And so they had gone off to the train in good humor.
His mother had refused to come. Perfectly understandable, Mr. Tierney said, given how the man had stood against their marriage. Because she was an immigrant. Because she was a servant girl in the home of an Upper West Side family who summered in Poughkeepsie—a wealthy family that his own father had admired and envied and aspired to imitate. It had been an elevation for his father, a schoolteacher, the child of immigrants himself, to be invited to the summer home of such people. A confirmation of the schoolteacher’s growing status as town sage, as cosmopolitan man-of-the-world, to be invited to converse with a city man of such wealth, in his own summer place, about business and politics, philosophy and learning.
And an irreconcilable insult that the schoolteacher, so honored, should bring along a son—“Yours truly,” Mr. Tierney told Patrick on the train to Poughkeepsie, “and not much older than you are now”—who, rather than attending to the after-dinner conversation, rather than seizing the opportunity to make himself remarkable to this businessman from Manhattan, a man who might do him some good, put his eyes on a buck-toothed servant girl and refused to draw them away.
“Of course your mother’s not buck-toothed,” his father said on the train, “she’s a beauty beyond compare—but that was my father’s anger speaking, his disappointment and his rage. He didn’t want me coming down in the world, he wanted me going up, up, and up.” On the train, Michael Tierney thrust his right hand into the air as if he were elevating a great weight. Then he dropped it, casually. Shrugged.
It was a fine spring day, and as soon as the train left the city, the smell of new grass and rich earth, sweet country air, began to fill the cars. At each station stop, the sun was morning-bright and full of lovely, floating things, white seed pods and green insects, butterflies and bumblebees. There were urns of vivid flowers at each train station, and the men and women who disembarked seemed all to be greeted by handsome children and happy dogs. His father had given him the window seat when they boarded and then sat with regal bearing on the aisle, tipping his hat to every new passenger. “Lovely day,” he said. “Madam.” “Sir.” “Good morning.” “Fine weather.” The doorman’s trade.
A woman who had already been greeted rose into the aisle to wait for the station ahead. Michael Tierney touched his hat to her again, and she beamed at the two of them. She was not a young woman, but she wore a pale spring suit and a summer fur and there was a gold bracelet over the wrist of the gloved hand that gripped the back of the seat in front of them. “Is this your son?” she asked, and his father said, laughing, “I stand accused.”
“He’s very handsome,” she said, and his father looked at him and feigned a start. “Is he?”
The train was coming into the station. “You are a very handsome pair,” the woman said, her eyes all on his father. Once more his father raised his hat as she left them, smiling, for the door. Father and son exchanged a look of chagrin, and then his father, dear man, put out his hand and patted the boy’s knee. There wasn’t a chance, they both knew, that an estrangement of any sort would ever drive them apart.
The station at Poughkeepsie bustled somewhat more than the others, but it was a country station nonetheless. His father knew the way. It was a small brick church, already filling up with what appeared to be the town’s oldest citizens. Gray-haired men and stooped women in floor-sweeping skirts. The mothball scent of hibernation all about their clothes. The pallbearers—the coffin was a gleaming mahogany—seemed the youngest of the attendees, but even they were thick about the middle. Patrick heard their straining breaths as they carried the coffin down the aisle. They were followed by only two mourners. One was a tiny woman smiling like a bride behind her black veil, and beside her, walking slowly, with practiced patience, a one-legged man who leaned on a crutch, the sleeve of his missing arm pinned neatly against his shoulder. His hair was the pale orange of an ancient redhead, with a streak of pure white on the right side, above a gnarled patch of silver scar tissue, the twisted remains of an ear.